October 11th at 18:30, in ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107, Amsterdam
Frege’s philosophy of language and logic had a profound impact on 20th century analytic philosophy. This includes Ludwig Wittgenstein, who throughout his career both embraced some of Frege’s results and emphatically rejected others. In this talk, we will take a look at Frege’s theory of assertion and its ties to the sense/reference distinction as well as Wittgenstein’s criticism of those doctrines in the latter’s infamous Tractatus. Specifically, we will look at proposition 4.063 of the Tractatus. On the one hand, we will ask what the exact structure of the argument is, and, on the other hand, we will discuss some of the arguments against Frege that have been extracted from that proposition by commentators of Wittgenstein and review their individual plausibility.